The Message
Right-wing podcasters are attacking higher education. Millions are listening.
Earlier this fall we asked Elena Cox to look at the messages that right-wing podcasters were delivering to their audiences about higher education. Elena, a terrific data journalist, focused her reporting on four podcasters with vast audiences: Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh.
As Elena told me, “After scraping hundreds of episodes and analyzing thousands of hours of audio, I found that each host has a different niche within conservative media, but one of the things they have in common was the nonstop critique of higher education. Some of their comments were explicit. But far more often there were quick asides or inside jokes between the host and their listeners or guests. What was clear though, was a deep disdain for higher education.”
-MS
Rising costs and diminished returns on investment have fueled the widespread crisis of confidence in higher education, as my colleague Kate Selig reported in October. But a closer look reveals just how deeply partisan those views have become. Republicans are now half as likely as Democrats to say getting a degree is very important to future success, according to September polling from Gallup.
Before President Donald Trump began his assault on higher education, colleges and universities were already a major target in the far right’s broader ideological battle. And some of the most vociferous critics also have the biggest reach: right-wing podcasters, whose tens of millions of listeners skew young, white and male. Their message is clear and relentless: don’t waste your money and time going to college.
Among the fiercest critics are four of the most widely heard voices in the nation: podcaster Joe Rogan; Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro; former Fox News host Tucker Carlson; and right-wing political commentator Matt Walsh.
The Joe Rogan Experience has 59 million monthly listeners, according to Podscribe, which measures audience reach for podcast advertisers. (These numbers do not account for people who watch episodes on YouTube, where The Joe Rogan Experience has 20.4 million subscribers.) About 8 in 10 of the show’s listeners are men, according to polling firm Edison Research.
The Tucker Carlson Show is the 18th most popular podcast by reach, according to Edison rankings. The Ben Shapiro Show, which boasts 2.4 million monthly listeners according to Podscribe, has an audience that skews younger; 70% of his listeners are under the age of 40. The Matt Walsh Show has 433,000 monthly listeners and was the fastest-growing conservative podcast in 2023.
We’ve done a deep dive on the message about higher education those podcasters are sending to their followers. We analyzed transcripts from 777 podcast episodes totaling 1,179 hours that aired between October 2024 and October 2025. Rogan, Carlson and Walsh discussed higher education in about 35 episodes each. Shapiro was even more vocal on the topic, which he talked about in some 50 episodes.
The message circles back to a few often-repeated themes: Colleges push left-wing ideology; they aren’t worth the cost; and they are elitist institutions that dismiss trades and other non-degree career paths.
(We have compiled a database that we’re making available for others to peruse and to draw their own conclusions.)
When you look at the words most often spoken about college in those episodes, by the host or their guest, it’s easy to get a sense of the lens through which they view higher education:
Loan or loans: 106 times.
Trans, transgender, or gender: 79 times.
DEI: 76 times.
Liberal or liberalism: 43 times.
Woke and wokeness: 39 times. (Anti-woke was mentioned three times.)
Anti-semitism: discussed 38 times.
Across hundreds of hours of audio, here is just a fraction of what we heard:
Colleges are liberal or “woke” institutions that indoctrinate students and limit free speech
A central theme among these right-wing podcasters is the belief that colleges are liberal institutions pushing left-wing ideology, indoctrinating students through Marxist-leaning curriculum and “woke” DEI policies. In an episode that aired the day before the presidential election, Ben Shapiro called for ending the college system as it currently exists.
“Liberal arts studies have become indoctrination centers for the left. Colleges are there now to teach students to protest their civilization, become good little left-wing-apparatus activists—that’s what they are—rather than to be good citizens. The left encourages this. They want it. It is not a coincidence that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was recently caught on email telling the president of Columbia University to ignore Jew hatred on campus since he said only Republicans were upset. The universities are the corrupt preserve for the radical left. They’re the breeding ground for Democratic donors and leaders. They are the engine of wokeness. They ought to be torn down as they currently stand. I’m not talking about the STEM program at MIT. I’m talking about the liberal arts aspect of these universities that are there only to churn out good little leftwing activists.”
(Shapiro’s claims about Senator Schumer were based on an October 2024 report about anti-Semitism on college campuses from the House of Representatives’ Republican-led Committee on Education and the Workforce. A spokesperson for Schumer denied the claims, calling them hearsay.)
After Trump was elected president for the second time, California State University, Chico President Steven Perez announced the school would provide mental health services to students who were disappointed in the results. Days later, Walsh mocked the initiative, which included standard counseling as well as painting and journaling.
“If I was running a college campus, I would also offer coloring books to any students who are feeling sad so that anyone who came to get a coloring book could be immediately expelled,” Walsh said. “We’d offer all kinds of services. You know, the wokest services imaginable, but the catch is that you’ll be expelled if you accept them.”
In a July episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, the late Charlie Kirk denounced DEI initiatives and what he described as the “feminization” of higher education, arguing that students are encouraged to “sit still, do as you’re told, read the hyper-feminine books.” Kirk claimed colleges promote majors and careers that, in his view, further this push toward “hyper-feminine ideals.”
“They’re not the more masculine jobs that we need, which is like industrial engineering… They’re HR managers. They’re ‘norm enforcers.’ They’re empathy driven. They’re sociologists or DEI czars. And so thankfully we’re finally pushing back on DEI, but a young man doesn’t want to go be an HR manager.”
In one episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Irish comedian and anti-trans activist Graham Linehan took these arguments further, claiming that colleges were “indoctrinating” students to become transgender.
“I’m worried about my kids,” he told Rogan. “My kids are going into university and half of me wants to just protect them from it because… I know so many stories of people who went to university and came back with a trans identity.”
Rogan did not challenge the claim; instead, he agreed that impressionable young people could be “indoctrinated” or drawn into “any kind of group” while in college.
Liberal arts programs in particular are overpriced relative to their value, and the student loan system functions as federal welfare
Right-wing podcasters have argued that student loan forgiveness is essentially federal welfare and a taxpayer-funded bailout for colleges and predatory loan providers.
In a pre-election episode with financial adviser Dave Ramsey, Tucker Carlson singled out schools such as Duke University and Middlebury College for promoting what he described as “anti-human, anti-civilizational, anti-American” ideas. When discussing student loan forgiveness, he questioned why the federal government should step in to assist such institutions, especially those with large, tax-free endowments that already benefit from federal grants and subsidies.
“They’re not paying any taxes at all, we’re subsidizing them. And then when their scam gets exposed we have to clean it up?”
In July, after the Trump administration restructured federal student loan payments under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Joe Rogan criticized the system in a conversation with Democratic state Rep. James Talarico of Texas. Rogan argued that many young Americans are pushed into taking on massive debt before they fully understand its long-term consequences.
“You spent hundreds of thousands of dollars getting some degree in the humanities, getting some degree in gender studies, some just nonsensical degree that you’re never going to get a job from. And now you are condemned to not just pay that initial debt but with interest forever,” Rogan said. “They will go to the grave in debt for predatory loans that they took out when they were so young their frontal cortex wasn’t even fully developed yet. They didn’t have any idea what they were doing. They were being coerced by a bunch of people that told them this is the only way. That you have to do this, otherwise you’re going to be a loser.”
Ben Shapiro took a more abrasive tone, blaming borrowers for taking out loans they aren’t able to pay back in the first place.
“You people take out gigantic loans on the false promise made by colleges that they’re going to earn more money. And that is a gigantic scam. I’ve been discussing this for years. However, the federal taxpayer should not be the one who has to pick up the bill for your decision to take out a gigantic loan to major in sociology at Wellesley. That really is not the taxpayer’s burden. That is your burden.”
Walsh, who did not attend college, has long urged his followers not to treat college as the default path after high school. In a June episode, he argued that the rise of artificial intelligence (and students’ reliance on it to complete assignments) underscores his argument that a college degree is no longer worth the cost.
“The modern education system was already obsolete. It’s already not working. It’s already not doing what it’s supposed to do, which is actually instill knowledge in the next generation. And now with AI, it really feels like the death knell.”
The idea that everyone would benefit from attending college is elitist and devalues blue-collar and traditionally male jobs
In his second term, the president has announced several initiatives to promote trade schools, including an executive order in April to invest in workforce development programs. In late May, Trump posted on his social media platform TruthSocial that he was considering redirecting $3 billion in Harvard grants to trade schools. In an episode that aired the next day, Shapiro applauded the suggestion, calling it “a smart populist move by the president of the United States.”
“Harvard deserves every little bit of this,” Shapiro added.
Joe Rogan, in an episode that aired after the 2024 election, argued that society places an inflated value on expensive college degrees that do not always lead to well-paid or fulfilling jobs.
“There’s also a weird distortion in our society, where we have decided that we place a higher value on someone spending an enormous amount on education for a job that doesn’t pay nearly as much as the education costs,” Rogan said. “And if you’re a guy who can figure out how to do good carpentry, if you understand how to use tools, you’re taught properly, you have a good apprenticeship, you can make an incredible living, it’s very satisfying,” he said, speaking with Mike Rowe, the creator and host of Dirty Jobs on Discovery Channel.
These beliefs are part of the podcasters’ broader argument that the education system disadvantages young men, particularly white men, who are increasingly opting out of college.
In an April 2025 episode, Walsh cited a Bloomberg Businessweek article that detailed the decline of men attending universities.
“A functioning country should not require that every 18-year-old goes to college,” he said.
He added that “the main reason people should be going to college,” if they choose to, is “if they want to master some highly specialized skill, whether it’s engineering or programming or medicine.”
He then claimed that, even for students who want to attend for these majors, schools discriminate against white men and that is a reason for the decline in young white men attending college altogether.
“We have a system where even if you’re a very smart individual who could theoretically become a doctor, you stand a very real chance of being denied admission to a medical school simply because you’re white or because you have the wrong political beliefs. And if you’re confronted with that possibility and you’re 18 years old, why would you bother with the whole process? Why not take a guaranteed job where your skills will pay you right away? Why subject yourself to hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and years of indoctrination, especially if it may not pay off, for reasons that are both completely unfair and outside of your control entirely?”
Here is a CSV file containing all episodes that reference “college” or “university,” along with the relevant transcript segments. Each entry includes the host, episode title, YouTube link, and AI-generated segment summaries and transcripts. Please note that the transcripts do not distinguish between host and guest voices, so listeners should review the audio before citing any quotes.
- Elena Cox
After 25 years in higher ed in several states and in Canada, as well as in public and private universities, I agree with the conservative critique of higher ed for the most part. What College Watch needs is diversity of views, meaning discussions involving those right of center, as well as inviting conservative to write for College Watch. I would participate in discussions: pjm728@ gmail.com (J'98)
Really thorough anaysis. What stands out is how the messaging isn't random but targeted at specific demographics: young white men being told colleges discriminate against them, blue-collar audiences hearing their work is devalued. The data on word frequency (trans, DEI, woke) shows this isn't about student debt policy as much as identiy grievance bundled with economic critique, and that combination is whats making the message stick across millions of listeners.